The Basques

The homeland of the Basques, known by Basque nationalists as Euzkadi,
occupies the littoral of the Bay of Biscay as it curves north into
France. The region extends inland some 150 kilometers, through the
juncture of the Pyrenees and the Cordillera Cantabrica, and thence south
to the Rio Ebro. The region covers nearly 21,000 square kilometers, of
which about 3,000 lie on the French side of the international frontier.
The 18,000 square kilometers on the Spanish side constitute about 3.6
percent of Spain's total land area.

About 3 million people lived in this area in the late 1980s.
Approximately 300,000 people were on the French side of the border,
while the remaining 2.7 million people were concentrated primarily in
the two Spanish coastal provinces of Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya and, less
densely, in the two inland provinces of #Alava and Navarre. This
population lived under two distinct autonomous communities: Basque
Country, which incorporated the three smaller provinces, and Navarre,
which by itself constituted a "uniprovincial" regional
government.

The Basques are among the oldest peoples of Europe. Despite their
having been visited by numerous waves of invaders, the Basques reached
the tenth century still fairly isolated from the flow of West European
history. In the tenth and the eleventh centuries, the rising kingdom of
Navarre absorbed most of the rest of the Basque peoples, and it created
for the first time a more or less unified Basque political entity. With
the kingdom's decline, however, the region fell into disorder, and by
the sixteenth century, the Basque provinces had been integrated into the
kingdom of Castile. From this time until the nineteenth century,
relations between Castile and the Basque provinces were governed by the fueros,
local privileges and exemptions by which the Spanish king recognized the
special nature of the Basque provinces and even a number of Basque towns. As a result of the centralization of the Spanish
state and the Carlist Wars, the fueros had been abolished by
the end of the nineteenth century. The Second Republic in the 1930s
offered the chance to create a new autonomous Basque regime, but all
such efforts were doomed by the Spanish Civil War. After the war, the
Franco dictatorship sought--unsuccessfully--to suppress all signs of
Basque distinctiveness, especially the use of the language.

Through most of the twentieth century, the thriving Basque economy,
centered on the steel and the shipbuilding industries of Vizcaya and the
metal-processing shops in Guipuzcoa, attracted thousands of Spaniards
who migrated there in search of jobs and a better way of life. Between
1900 and 1980, the number of people moving into the region exceeded
those who left by nearly 450,000, the heaviest flow occurring during the
decade of the 1960s. In the 1970s, the flow began to reverse itself
because of political upheaval and economic decline. Between 1977 and
1984, the net outflow was nearly 51,000. The consequence of this heavy
in-migration was a population in the late 1980s that was only marginally
ethnic Basque and that in many urban areas was clearly non-Basque in
both language and identity. One authoritative study found that only 52
percent of the population had been born in the Basque region of parents
also born there, 11 percent had been born in the region of parents born
elsewhere, and 35.5 percent had been born outside the region.

The Basque region has been for decades the arena for a clash between
an encroaching modern culture and its values (speaking Spanish,
identifying with Spain, working in industry, living in a large city) and
a native, traditional culture and its values (speaking Euskera,
identifying with one's village or province, working on a small farm or
in the fishing sector, living on a farm or in a small village). The
former population was found concentrated in the larger cities such as
Bilbao, while the latter lived in the small fishing villages along the
Bay of Biscay or in mountain farmsteads, called caserios,
located in the mountains of Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, and Navarre. These
centers of Basque traditional culture have been in constant decline
since the introduction of heavy industry to the region in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, and they could well disappear by the
end of the twentieth century.

The use of the Basque language has also been in steady decline for
centuries, but the erosion has accelerated since the 1950s with the rise
in non-Basque migration to the region. A 1984 language census confirmed
what unofficial estimates had already observed: that Basque was a
weakened minority language, although not yet moribund. Of the 2.1
million people in the Basque Country autonomous region, 23 percent could
understand Euskera, 21 percent could speak it, but only 13 percent could
read the language and only 10 percent could write it. These data
indicate that the Basque language has survived principally as an oral
language without much of a written tradition, and that it is conserved
not by formal teaching in schools but by informal teaching in the home.
Officials in the Basque Country launched a number of important programs,
especially in television and education, to restore the language to a
level of parity with Castilian Spanish, but the success of these efforts
will not be confirmed for at least a generation. Officially, the
objective was to make the Basque population bilingual in Spanish and in
Basque; but that goal seemed quite remote in the late 1980s.